Books by Derek Maul

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

God's big plans

DELETE: Hmmm. I just highlighted about one hour of careful writing, paused for a moment, then hit “delete.” There was nothing intrinsically wrong with anything I wrote, it simply didn’t go anywhere.

A little like life, sometimes, to be honest. You know what I mean. We can chug along, going through the basics of day-to-day responsibilities, sometimes for weeks or months at a time, and then realize that nothing has really happened.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not suggesting that we need big fat audacious goals hanging in front of us literally all the time. You know, like:

“This week climb Mount Kilimanjaro.”

or “Don’t forget to solve Tampa’s homeless problem by the end of June.”

But I do believe it’s too easy to fall into a pervasive aimlessness. And that, in our ongoing conversation via this blog, is not any kind of life-charged experience at all.

MISCUE: But isn’t that how we tend to deliberately live our lives? You know, arranging as much as possible to fall into the “no surprises” realm of experience. We work hard for predictability; we want to know what to expect; we go out of the way to protect the status quo.

Our big picture goal, it seems, is often to have no challenge or difficulty at all.

I believe such an approach amounts to a tragic miscue when it comes to translating the principles of a life of faith into the world where we are called to live and to serve from day-to-day.

This morning I read the following idea about what God has in mind for a more challenging and purposeful approach to living:

“I became [the gospel’s] servant according to God’s commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:25-27).

SO LIVE ALREADY! For this world, the apostle Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, the hope of glory is “Christ in you.” In other words, the evidence of the Christ-life – as translated into and modeled by my modus operandi – is how God has chosen to make known “the riches of his glory among the Gentiles.”

A huge component of my purpose, then, is to live as a walking PR campaign for the life-charged life.

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About Me

Life is good. It's about living in partnership with my wife, Rebekah, about serving God in the context of our church home, about being the parent of two amazing children, and of both honing and using my particular gifts in order to make this world a better place.